The Perseverance rover presently exploring Mars lately celebrated a milestone: its first Martian 12 months since touchdown. Although the rover landed within the Jezero Crater in February 2021, making it nearly two Earth years outdated, NASA measures its Mars missions in Martian years. As Mars orbits farther from the solar than the Earth does, it has longer years, at 687 days, so the rover hit its first Martian birthday this week on January 6.
The top of Perseverance’s first Martian 12 months additionally marks the tip of its main mission, because the rover was designed to function for one Martian 12 months minimal. However the rover continues to be wholesome and going sturdy, so it instantly started its prolonged mission by which it should proceed to discover the crater for proof of historic life and to gather samples of Martian rock and regolith.
The rover lately began making a pattern cache on Mars, the place samples might be left for the longer term Mars Pattern Return mission to gather and produce again to Earth. It’ll proceed to work on this mission as its new prolonged mission begins.
“We’ll nonetheless be working the pattern depot deployment when our prolonged mission begins on January 7, so nothing modifications from that perspective,” mentioned Artwork Thompson, Perseverance’s mission supervisor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, defined on the finish of final 12 months in an announcement. “Nevertheless, as soon as the desk is ready at Three Forks, we’ll head to the highest of the delta. The science crew desires to take a superb go searching up there.”
The delta Thompson is referring to is the location of an historic river delta, which is an thrilling goal for exploration as a result of it may maintain clues as to if microbial life ever existed on Mars. To get to the delta, the rover must journey up a steep embankment, and it ought to attain the highest of the delta prepared to begin exploring someday subsequent month. It’ll then spend eight months exploring the world.
“The Delta Prime Marketing campaign is our alternative to get a glimpse on the geological course of past the partitions of Jezero Crater,” mentioned JPL’s Katie Stack Morgan, deputy mission scientist for Perseverance. “Billions of years in the past a raging river carried particles and boulders from miles past the partitions of Jezero. We’re going to discover these historic river deposits and acquire samples from their long-traveled boulders and rocks.”
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